On Wednesday, November 20 at 6:00pm, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) will hold an in-person public hearing on the proposed Groundwater Discharge Permit for the Fremont Digester, at the request of FLOW and the coalition of residents and organizations working to strengthen environmental protections.
What is the Fremont Digester?
The Fremont anaerobic digester is a huge facility that uses bacteria to decompose organic waste (such as commercial food waste and factory farm sewage) and generate biogas. The byproduct of this process is a concentrated sludge called “digestate.” The digestate – often full of heavy metals and biological hazards – is held in massive cesspits, then sprayed on fields as “fertilizer.” Neighbors are assaulted by noxious, intolerable odors, and the digestate runs off of overloaded fields and into lakes, streams, groundwater – and residential wells.
What is a groundwater discharge permit?
A permit would give the operator (Generate Upcycle) legal authorization to dispose of its wastewater to the ground or groundwater. The permit governs the manner in which wastewater is pre-treated and released into our environment.
In order to continue operating, Generate Upcycle must secure a groundwater discharge permit from EGLE – a necessity that the company has been evading and delaying for years. Unfortunately, EGLE has now proposed a permit that does not go far enough to protect the surrounding watershed, farmland, and community.
That’s why earlier this year, the FLOW Coalition submitted public comments to EGLE, detailing our concerns. We made specific recommendations to the agency regarding field application of digestate, response to citizen odor complaints, and pre-treatment of digestate to remove chemicals.
How can I attend the meeting?
It’s important to make your voice heard in defense of our natural resources and drinking water. The meeting is open to the public, and will be held at the Fremont Area District Library. If you’d like to submit a comment, you can do so here: https://mienviro.michigan.gov/ncore/external/publicnotice/info/1908290194134435184/comments
We must continue to have high bars for environmental analysis and protections to keep our lands free from toxic pollutants that poison the earth and water, above and below the ground. As our knowledge expands about the different pollutants and effects they have on land, people and wildlife the more we need to put controls on discharges from all sources. We must be vigilant in this and not allow money to rule and sway our resolve to protect and save clean air, water and earth for generations to come.
Please also understand that anaerobic digestion is an important process in Michigan to manage wasted food. Food entering our landfills contributes to over 10 percent of the overall greenhouse gas emissions in this state. There must be a neutral place where FLOW and Generate meet to allow this process to exist.
Thanks Roger for commenting on behalf of the trash and recycling industry and your company, FinitePhoenix. We at FLOW appreciate that reducing, reusing, and recycling waste is critical to managing the human waste stream. Aerobic digesters and composters, done right, can be great solutions. We hope that you’ll read FLOW’s comments to EGLE (linked above) about the draft groundwater discharge permit for the Fremont digester. This isn’t knee-jerk opposition. We represent a large coalition of local residents who are afraid to drink their well water and worry that they’re experiencing elevated cancer rates that could be linked to field spreading of digestate containing PFAS and other toxic contaminants. Industrial scale anaerobic digesters need careful management to make sure they don’t create more problems than they solve.
The Fremont digester and accompanying twenty two million gallons of lagoon storage are in my neighborhood. It may have npk value – but often at too high of levels for safe use on crops if not carefully applied. It’s been extensively tested here in Fremont and has two PFAS chemicals detected in the digestate. In the extensive panel of analytes, it tests higher than acceptable state ground water discharge levels for many things including aluminum, acetone, 2butanone, (both solvents) ammonia as N, chloride, cyanide, iron, manganese, sodium, dissolved solids, vandanium. It is not tested at all for microplastics which are known to be in food waste, especially depackaged food waste like as is the case at many found waste digesters. This “fertilizer “ is so incredibly valuable according to the biogas industry. Why in world then is it free? SMH. Because the biogas industry wants to use our farmland as a dumpster. I am a farmer who is glad I didn’t fall for their BS. This is NOT an appropriate way to deal with food waste. Our state environmental regulatory agency needs to step up to the plate. Their own agency’s geologists have shown many wells in my area are at high and very high risk of contamination if the digestate is spread near to wells or runs off to near wells. Farm field run off happens all the time through over application, accidents and unexpected heavy rains. Dig deeper and biogas is a greenwashing Trojan Horse not a solution to our energy problems.
Sorry, I’d forgotten to mention in my first comment: Generate chose not to disclose the presence of pfas but lied about the results and hid it since they knew it was detected as early as February 2020. Why? Because they could get away with it. They’re not an outlier in the biogas industry. Look the other way, deny, cover up and hope you don’t get caught seems to be the general M.O.